CISE

Staff Announcement

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Howard Wactlar as Director of the CISE Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS), effective June 7, 2010.

Howard is currently Vice Provost for Research Computing, Associate Dean, School of Computer Science, and Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has served CMU in various research, technical and administrative capacities, including most recently, that of Scientific Director of the NSF Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Engineering Research Center at CMU. He graduated in Physics from the University of Maryland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was primary architect and served as project director of the Informedia Digital Video Library, one of the original U.S. NSF Digital Library Initiative projects. He has been the principal investigator for a number defense and intelligence agency research projects on automated video analysis and information integration, and multiple NSF and NIH-funded CareMedia-related projects in machine understanding of human health and behavior. He was a co-founder and Associate Director of the DoD-funded Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Director of the joint CMU/IBM Information Technology Center that pioneered ubiquitous campus computing. He holds basic patents for processes related to automated video library creation and video search and summarization, and is co-inventor of a pending patent for automated video capture and analysis of human behavior. He co-founded MediaSite, organized to commercialize video information extraction and search technology. He has been active in establishing video information research programs in the U.S., Europe and China through joint initiatives with multiple foreign partners. His current research centers on multimedia information systems, machine learning and intelligent systems, and their application to improving health care.

We are indebted to Haym Hirsh for the numerous contributions he has made to CISE and to the computing community as Director of the IIS Division over the last four years. Haym will return to his position at Rutgers University in the summer of 2010.